Tag Archives: disability insurance

A while back I wrote a post critical of a Planet Money/This American Life episode on disability insurance. Among other things, I thought that the episode made too much of the fact that the number of people on federal disability insurance (SSDI or SSI) has gone up since the financial crisis.

The book I’m currently reading with my daughter at family reading time (she just finished a fictional book about a Polish immigrant girl in a mining community in the late nineteenth century) is Social Insurance: America’s Neglected Heritage and Contested Future, by Theodore Marmor, Jerry Mashaw, and John Pakutka. It’s a pretty good overview of the programs that are typically thought of (at least by the left and center-left) as social insurance in this country. Here’s what they say about recent trends in disability insurance (pp. 166–67):

“It has long been understood by those who study disability insurance that during times of economic distress, the incidence of claimed disability increases. Impairments that might have been overcome during times of economic growth and high rates of employment become the basis for claims of disability. . . . As a recession drags on and jobs are not plentiful, many no doubt make the choice to see if a musculoskeletal malady or a mood disorder qualifies them for disability insurance benefits.”

In the longer term—meaning before the financial crisis—disability rates have been creeping upward. The main reasons are: (1) an aging population; (2) the slow increase in the full retirement age for Social Security, which keeps people on SSDI (as opposed to OASI) longer; and (3) the increasing frequency of musculoskeletal and mood disorder claims (e.g., depression). These are all completely normal things, unless you want to go back to the bad old days when mental illnesses like depression were not considered on pair with physical illnesses. At the margin, there is certainly fraud in the system, but in fact it’s quite hard to get disability benefits, and the standards aren’t getting any more lenient.

Back in the heady days of the financial crisis, I used to recommend Planet Money as a good way for non-specialists to learn about some of the basic economic and financial issues involved. Over the years, I’ve become less thrilled with the show, for reasons that will become obvious below. In particular, whenever Ira Glass dedicates a full This American Life episode to a Planet Money story, I cringe nervously, but I listen to it anyway, since, well, I’ve listened to just about every TAL episode ever, and I’m not about to stop now.

But I can’t let this weekend’s episode, on Social Security disability benefits, pass without comment. In it, Chana Joffe-Walt “investigates” the Social Security disability program, first by visiting Hale County in Alabama, where 25% of all working age adults are receiving disability benefits, and then by talking to different types of people (lawyers and public sector contractors) who help people apply for benefits.